ORB
Exploring analogies of the city



Deep in the bowels of time, of the city, of society exist ambiguous, uninhibited, alluring spaces of interaction...

...Parties - simultaneous parties, virtual parties, hybrid parties - harboring volatile relationships, inter-cultural nomadism, spontaneous creativity, incidental interactions that change the future of our world.

Parties, while seemingly enigmatic, intangible and temporal, can be seen as the life-force of cities.

What if several parties could be rolled into one and experienced as a complex 'organ' of cities?

The Orb is the virtual manifestation of the party as life-force of the city. It is the vital organ of the future city. A city generator.

This is how it will function:

Over a 24 hour time frame parties are happening simultaneously around the world - Tokyo, New York, Kyoto, Boston, Hong Kong, LA, Taiwan, Seoul, Amsterdam, and your city! These parties are connected to a shared chat space.
At each of the parties still images are collected from i) digital cameras ii) web cam iii) and keitai cameras and fed to a computer.

The computer at each party sends images from that party to a remote server.
On the server, there is a program which is continuously 'writing' the images to a 'virtual orb city' - the Orb. The images will be represented as enormous billboards pasted onto the sides of virtual 'buildings'. The entire manifestation of these will be spherical.

As time passes, the Orb grows, creating a 'time path' of the parties' events. Regions in the city will represent different time frames of the event. When Tokyo is day, NY will be night. These varying surges of activity will be meshed into one time-based 'urban sprawl'.

Then, at each of the parties, there is a 'navigation' computer connected to a projector, which illuminates the walls of the party with the images of the virtual city.

Any party person at the 'navigation' computer can 'walk through' the Virtual city using a mouse or joystick, and this experience will be projected onto the wall for all party goers to see. As they walk along, they will come across 50 storey buildings with images of party scenes in remote cities.

There could be any number of these navigation-projectors. The more navigation-projectors, the more 'enveloping' the virtual city will become in the party space.

At the end of the 24 hours, the Orb will be a virtual organ that represents 'party as life-force of the city'.